Doron Wolf born in 1976, Nahalal, Israel. He currently lives and works in Hamden, CT, USA. He received his B.E.D from Oranim College Art Institute in 2009, and his M.F.A from Haifa University in 2012. He holds a faculty position at Zefat academic college and a lecturer position at Oranim College.
Wolf’s primary medium of work is oil on canvas. He works in a figurative-realistic style that ranges between realism and conceptualism. His work refers to classic themes such as still life (vanitas), portraits, and domestic interior scenes with a contemporary perspective on light and his personal life.
In his work, he is inspired by snapshot photos, captured or downloaded, to create the painting. In the creation process, he devotes himself to the realistic representation and uses it to build a rich visual atmosphere while emphasizing it is mediated. Likewise, he blends attributes and quotations of art history images with everyday scenes and explores the relationship between painting and photography. As part of his work, he investigates the role of an image in our current world, which is loaded with visual contexts and stimulations.
Wolf has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in Israel and abroad. His work is found in privet collections.
Artist Statement
My painting work combines fragments from the history of art with biographical marks and themes from my personal life. In the works, I connect high and low contacts and, through them, raise questions about originality, as well as about the tension created between quick photography and a slow and lingering painting. Through these questions, I view the contemporary lifestyle from my private life’s perspective and examine the changing reality.
The artistic language of my works is figurative painting with classical materials of oil on canvas. The process of the work is a slow and meticulous painting done using small brushes, as opposed to the sources of inspiration created from the pictorial connection of several images that were shot quickly, “snapshot,” using the “smartphone” or collected from the web. I deliberately view reality through intermediaries and not directly, influenced by the digital culture in the contemporary era flooded with visual images. The paintings juxtapose an atmosphere of everyday household domestic scenes with people, animals, and culturally-charged images from the worlds of art and pop culture.
The light in the painting is electric and artificial, distorting the image and creating a sense of drama and resonance with paintings from the past. I look for lighting conditions that are either excessive or insufficient in a way that impairs viewing. Another central object in my work is the mirror, which is also found in some of the works I quote. The reflections of some of these works in the mirror create an infinite threading of the image, thus reinforcing questions about originality, simulacrum, identity, and on the observation of a mediated and split reality.
In my paintings, I refer to “Vanitas” and domestic interior paintings from the 17th century. The interiors I paint are homely and personal spaces or museums and public spaces. Recently, I started creating a series of interior paintings inspired by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, emphasizing the relationship between the imprisoner and the prisoner, between man, nature, and the environment. In this series, groups of people are depicted looking at dioramas in which stuffed animals are placed in a panoramic landscape setting in a dark museum space. I tried to produce with the work a kind of encapsulation of natural, archaic, and futuristic cultures, all in one, and a sense of freezing in time between the natural and the artificial.